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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



BY 



JOSEPH H. CHOATE 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 



1 



iL-ibfMr> of Conui'-'^fJ 
Wo CoHltS REt.tlVtO 

JAN 24 1901 

^ Copyright entry 

NoXxk7.ZV:.7..a. 

SECOND COPY 






Copyright, 1901, 
By Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. 



AN ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



EDINBURGH PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTION 

NOVEMBER THE THIRTEENTH 
Nineteen Hundred 



(3) 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



When you asked me to deliver the Inaugural Address 
on this occasion, I recognized that I owed this compli- 
ment to the fact that I was the official representative of 
America — and in selecting a subject I ventured to think 
that I might interest you for an hour in a brief study in 
popular government, as illustrated by the life of the 
most American of all Americans, I therefore offer no 
apology for asking your attention to Abraham Lincoln 
— to his unique character and the part he bore in two 
important achievements of modern history : the preserva- 
tion of the integrity of the American Union and the 
emancipation of the colored race. 

During his brief term of power he was probably the 
object of more abuse, vilification, and ridicule than any 
other man in the world ; but when he fell by the hand of 
an assassin, at the very moment of his stupendous vic- 
tory, all the nations of the earth vied with one another 
in paying homage to his character ; and the thirty- five 
years that have since elapsed have established his place 
in history as one of the great benefactors not of his own 
country alone, but of the human race. 

One of many noble utterances upon the occasion of his 
death was that in which " Punch " made its magnani- 
mous recantation of the spirit with which it had pursued 
him: — 

(5) 



O ABRAHAM LINCOLN: 

*' Beside this corpse that bears for winding sheet 
The stars and stripes he lived to rear anew, 
Between the mourners at his head and feet, 
Say, scurrile jester, is there room for you ? 

*' Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer, 
To lame my pencil, and confute my pen — 
To make me own this hind — of princes peer, 
This rail-splitter — a true born king of men." 

riction can f urnisli no matcli for the romance of his life, 
and biography will be searched in vain for such startling 
vicissitudes of fortune, so great power and glory won out 
of such humble beginnings and adverse circumstances. 

Doubtless you are all familiar with the salient points 
of his extraordinary career. In the zenith of his fame 
he was the wise, patient, courageous, successful ruler of 
men ; exercising more power than any monarch of his 
time, not for himself, but for the good of the people who 
had placed it in his hands ; commander-in-chief of a vast 
military power, which waged with ultimate success the 
greatest war of the century ; the triumphant champion 
of popular government, the deliverer of four millions of 
his fellow men from bondage ; honored by mankind as 
Statesman, President, and Liberator. 

Let us glance now at the first half of the brief life, of 
which this was the glorious and happy consummation. 
Nothing could be more squalid and miserable than the 
home in which Abraham Lincoln was born — a one- 
roomed cabin without floor or window in what was then 
the wilderness of Kentucky, in the heart of that frontier 
life which swiftly moved westward from the Alleghanies 
to the Mississippi, always in advance of schools and 
churches, of books and money, of railroads ■ and news- 
papers, of all things which are generally regarded as the 
comforts and even necessaries of life. His father, igno- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 7 

rant, needy, and thriftless, content if he could keep soul 
and body together for himself and his family, was ever 
seeking, without success, to better his unhappy condition 
by moving on from one such scene of dreary desolation 
to another. The rude society which surrounded them 
was not much better. The struggle for existence was 
hard, and absorbed all their energies. They were fighting 
the forest, the wild beast, and the retreating savage. 
From the time when he could barely handle tools until 
he attained his majority, Lincoln's life was that of a 
simple farm laborer, poorly clad, housed, and fed, at 
work either on his father's wretched farm or hired out to 
neighboring farmers. But in spite, or perhaps by means, 
of this rude environment, he grew to be a stalwart giant, 
reaching six feet four at nineteen, and fabulous stories 
are told of his feats of strength. With the growth of 
this mighty frame began that strange education which in 
his ripening years was to qualify him for the great des- 
tiny that awaited him, and the development of those 
mental faculties and moral endowments which, by the 
time he reached middle life, were to make him the saga- 
cious, patient, and triumphant leader of a great nation in 
the crisis of its fate. His whole schooling, obtained dur- 
ing such odd times as could be spared from grinding labor, 
did not amount in all to as much as one year, and the 
quality of the teaching was of the lowest possible grade, 
including only the elements of reading, writing, and ci- 
phering. But out of these simple elements, when rightly 
used by the right man, education is achieved ; and Lin- 
coln knew how to use them. As so often happens, he 
seemed to take warning from his father's unfortunate 
example. Untiring industry, an insatiable thirst for 
knowledge, and an evergrowing desire to rise above his 
surroundings, were early manifestations of his character. 



8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 

Books were almost unknown in that community, but 
the Bible was in every house, and somehow or other ^' Pil- 
grim's Progress," " ^sop's Fables," a " History of the 
United States," and a " Life of Washington " fell into his 
hands. He trudged on foot many miles through the 
wilderness to borrow an English Grammar, and is said 
to have devoured greedily the contents of the Statutes 
of Indiana that fell in his way. These few volumes he 
read and re-read — and his power of assimilation was 
great. To be shut in Avith a few books and to master 
them thoroughly sometimes does more for the develop- 
ment of character than freedom to range at large, in a 
cursory and indiscriminate way, through wide domains 
of literature. This youth's mind, at any rate, was 
thoroughly saturated with Biblical knowledge and Bibli- 
cal language, which, in after life, he used with great 
readiness and effect. But it was the constant use of the 
little knowledge which he had that developed and exer- 
cised his mental powers. After the hard day's work 
was done, while others slept, he toiled on, always read- 
ing or writing. From an early age he did his own 
thinking and made up his own mind — invaluable traits 
in the future President. Paper was such a scarce com- 
modity that, by the evening firelight, he would write and 
cipher on the back of a wooden shovel, and then shave 
it off to make room for more. By and by, as he ap- 
proached manhood, he began speaking in the rude gath- 
erings of the neighborhood, and so laid the foundation 
of that art of persuading his fellow men which was one 
rich result of his education, and one great secret of his 
subsequent success. 

Accustomed as Ave are in these days of steam and 
telegraphs to have every intelligent boy survey the 
whole world each morning before breakfast, and inform 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 9 

himself as to what is going on in every nation, it is 
hardly possible to conceive how benighted and isolated 
was the condition of the community at Pigeon Creek in 
Indiana, of which the family of Lincoln's father formed 
a part, or how eagerly an ambitious and high-spirited 
boy, such as he, must have yearned to escape. The first 
glimpse that he ever got of any world beyond the nar- 
row confines of his home was in 1828, at the age of 
nineteen, when a neighbor employed him to accompany 
his son down the river to New Orleans to dispose of a 
flat-boat of produce — a commission which he discharged 
with great success. 

Shortly after his return from this his first excursion 
into the outer world, his father, tired of failure in In- 
diana, packed his family and all his worldly goods into 
a single wagon drawn by two yoke of oxen, and after a 
fourteen days' tramp through the wilderness, pitched 
his camp once more in Illinois. Here Abraham, having 
come of age and being now his own master, rendered the 
last service of his minority by ploughing the fifteen-acre 
lot and splitting from the tall wain at trees of the pri- 
meval forest enough rails to surround the little clearing 
with a fence. Such was the ]ueagre outfit of this coming 
leader of men, at the age when the future British Prime 
Minister or statesman emerges from the university as 
a double first or senior wrangler, with every advantage 
that high training and broad culture and association 
with the wisest and the best of men and women can 
give, and enters upon some form of public service on 
the road to usefulness and honor, the University course 
being only the first stage of the public training. So 
Lincoln, at twenty-one, had just begun his preparation 
for the public life to which he soon began to aspire. 
For some years yet he must continue to earn his daily 



10 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

bread by the sweat of his brow, having absolutely 
no means, no home, no friend to consult. More farm 
work as a hired hand, a clerkship in a village store, 
the running of a mill, another trip to New Orleans on a 
fiat-boat of his own contriving, a pilot's berth on the 
river — these were the means by which he subsisted 
until, in the summer of 1832, when he was twenty-three 
years of age, an event occurred which gave him public 
recognition. 

The Black Hawk War broke out, and the Governor of 
Illinois calling for volunteers to repel the band of sav- 
ages whose leader bore that name, Lincoln enlisted and 
was elected captain by his comrades, among whom he 
had already established his supremacy by signal feats 
of strength and more than one successful single combat. 
During the brief hostilities he was engaged in no battle 
and won no military glory, but his local leadership was 
established. The same year he offered himself as a can- 
didate for the Legislature of Illinois, but failed at the 
polls. Yet his vast popularity with those who knew 
him was manifest. The district consisted of several 
councies, but the unanimous vote of the people of his 
own county was for Lincoln. Another unsuccessful at- 
tempt at store-keeping was followed by better luck at 
surveying, until his horse and instruments were levied 
upon under execution for the debts of his business ad- 
venture. 

I have been thus detailed in sketching his early years 
because upon these strange foundations the structure of 
his great fame and service was built. In the place of a 
school and university training fortune substituted these 
trials, hardships, and struggles as a preparation for the 
great work which he had to do. It turned out to be 
exactly what the emergency required. Ten years instead 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 11 

at the public school and the university certainly never 
could have fitted this man for the unique work which 
was to be thrown upon him. Some other Moses would 
have had to lead us to our Jordan, to the sight of our 
promised land of liberty. 

At the age of twenty-five he became a member of the 
Legislature of Illinois, and so continued for eight years, 
and, in the meantime, qualified himself by reading such 
law books as he could borrow at random — for he was 
too poor to buy any — to be called to the Bar. For his 
second quarter of a century — during which a single 
term in Congress introduced him into the arena of 
national questions — he gave himself up to law and 
politics. In spite of his soaring ambition, his two years 
in Congress gave him no premonition of the great destiny 
that awaited him, and at its close, in 1849, we find him 
an unsuccessful applicant to the President for appoint- 
ment as Commissioner of the General Land Office — a 
purely administrative Bureau; a fortunate escape for 
himself and for his country. Year by year his knowl- 
edge and power, his experience and reputation extended, 
and his mental faculties seemed to grow by what they 
fed on. His power of persuasion, which had always 
been marked, was developed to an extraordinary degree, 
now that he became engaged in congenial questions and 
subjects. Little by little he rose to prominence at the 
Bar, and became the most effective public speaker in the 
West. Not that he possessed any of the graces of the 
orator; but his logic was invincible, and his clearness 
and force of statement impressed upon his hearers the 
convictions of his honest mind, while his broad sympa- 
thies and sparkling and genial humor made him a uni- 
versal favorite as far and as fast as his acquaintance 
extended. 



12 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

These twenty years that elapsed from the time of his 
establishment as a lawyer and legislator in Springfield, 
the new capital of Illinois, furnished a fitting theatre for 
the development and display of his great faculties, and, 
with his new and enlarged opportunities, he obviously 
grew in mental stature in this second period of his career, 
as if to compensate for the absolute lack of advantages 
under which he had suffered in youth. As his powers 
enlarged, his reputation extended, for he was always 
before the people, felt a warm sympathy with all that 
concerned them, took a zealous part in the discussion of 
every public question, and made his personal influence 
ever more widely and deeply felt. 

My brethren of the legal profession will naturally ask 
me, how could this rough backwoodsman, whose youth 
had been spent in the forest or on the farm and the flat- 
boat, without culture or training, education or study, by 
the random reading, on the wing, of a few miscellaneous 
law books, become a learned and accomplished lawyer ? 
Well, he never did. He never would have earned his salt 
as a Writer for the Signet, nor have Avon a place as advo- 
cate in the Court of Session, where the technique of the 
profession has reached its highest perfection, and cen- 
turies of learning and precedent are involved in the 
equipment of a lawyer. Dr. Holmes, when asked by an 
anxious young mother, " When should the education of 
a child begin ? " replied, " Madam, at least two centuries 
before it is born ! " and so I am sure it is with the Scots 
lawyer. 

But not so in Illinois in 1840. Between 1830 and 1880 
its population increased twenty-fold, and Avhen Lincoln 
began practising law in Springfield in 1837, life in Illi- 
nois was very crude and simple, and so were the courts 
and the administration of justice. Books and libraries 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 13 

were scarce. But the people loved justice, upheld the 
law, and followed the courts, and soon found their favor- 
ites among the advocates. The fundamental principles 
of the common law, as set forth by Blackstone and 
Chitty, were not so difficult to acquire ; and brains, com- 
mon sense, force of character, tenacity of purpose, ready 
wit and power of speech did the rest, and supplied all the 
deficiencies of learning. 

The lawsuits of those days were extremely simple, and 
the principles of natural justice were mainly relied on to 
dispose of them at the Bar and on the Bench, without 
resort to technical learning. Eailroads, corporations ab- 
sorbing the chief business of the community, combined 
and inherited wealth, with all the subtle and intricate 
questions they breed, had not yet come in — and so the 
professional agents and the equipment which they re- 
quire were not needed. But there were many highly 
educated and powerful men at the Bar of Illinois, even 
in those early days, whom the spirit of enterprise had 
carried there in search of fame and fortune. It was by 
constant contact and conflict with these that Lincoln 
acquired professional strength and skill. Every commu- 
nity and every age creates its own Bar, entirely adequate 
for its present uses and necessities. So in Illinois, as the 
population and wealth of the State kept on doubling and 
quadrupling, its Bar presented a growing abundance of 
learning and science and technical skill. The early prac- 
titioners grew with its growth and mastered the requisite 
knowledge. Chicago soon grew to be one of the largest 
and richest and certainly the most intensely active city on 
the continent, and if any of my professional friends here 
had gone there in Lincoln's later years, to try or argue a 
cause, or transact other business, with any idea that 
Edinburgh or London had a monopoly of legal learning. 



14 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

science, or subtlety, they would certainly have found 
their mistake. 

In those early days in the West, every lawyer, especi- 
ally every court lawyer, was necessarily a politician, 
constantly engaged in the public discussion of the many 
questions evolved from the rapid development of town, 
county. State, and Federal affairs. Then and there, in 
this regard, public discussion supplied the place which 
the universal activity of the press has since monopolized, 
and the public speaker who, by clearness, force, earnest- 
ness, and wit, could make himself felt on the questions 
of the day would rapidly come to the front. In the 
absence of that immense variety of popular entertain- 
ments which now feed the public taste and appetite, the 
people found their chief amusement in frequenting the 
courts and public and political assemblies. In either 
place, he who impressed, entertained, and amused them 
most was the hero of the hour. They did not discrimi- 
nate very carefully between the eloquence of the forum 
and the eloquence of the hustings. Human nature ruled 
in both alike, and he who was the most effective speaker 
in a political harangue was often retained as most likely 
to win in a cause to be tried or argued. And I have no 
doubt in this way many retainers came to Lincoln. Fees, 
money in any form, had no charms for him — in his 
eager pursuit of fame he could not afford to make 
money. He was ambitious to distinguish himself by 
some great service to mankind, and this ambition for 
fame and real public service left no room for avarice in 
his composition. However much he earned, he seems to 
have ended every year hardly richer than he began it, 
and yet as the years passed, fees came to him freely. 
One of £1,000 is recorded — a very large professional 
fee at that time, even in any part of America, the para- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 15 

dise of lawyers. I lay great stress on Lincoln's career 
as a lawyer — much more than his biographers do — 
because in America a state of things exists wholly dif- 
ferent from that which prevails in Great Britain. The 
profession of the law always has been — and is to 
this day — the principal avenue to public life ; and I 
am sure that his training and experience in the courts 
had much to do with the development of those forces of 
intellect and character which he soon displayed on a 
broader arena. 

It was in political controversy, of course, that he 
acquired his wide reputation, and made his deep and 
lasting impression upon the people of what had now be- 
come the powerful State of Illinois, and upon the people 
of the Great West, to whom the political power and con- 
trol of the United States were already surely and swiftly 
passing from the older Eastern States. It was this repu- 
tation and this impression and the familiar knowledge of 
his character which had come to them from his local 
leadership, that happily inspired the people of the West 
to present him as their candidate, and to press him upon 
the Republican convention of 1860 as the fit and neces- 
sary leader in the struggle for life which was before the 
nation. 

That struggle, as you all know, arose out of the ter- 
rible question of Slavery — and I must trust to your 
general knowledge of the history of that question to 
make intelligible the attitude and leadership of Lincoln 
as the champion of the hosts of freedom in the final 
contest. Negro slavery had been firmly established in 
the Southern States from an early period of their his- 
tory. In 1619, the year before the " Mayflower " landed 
our Pilgrim Fathers upon Plymouth Rock, a Butch ship 
had discharged a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown 



IC ABEABAM LINCOLN. 

in Virginia. All through the colonial period their im- 
portation had continued. A few had found their way 
into the JSTorthern States, but in none of them in suffi- 
cient numbers to constitute danger or to afford a basis 
for political power. At the time of the adoption of the 
Federal Constitution, there is no doubt that the prin- 
cipal members of the Convention not only condemned 
slavery as a moral, social, and political evil, but believed 
that by the suppression of the slave trade it was in the 
course of gradual extinction in the South, as it certainly 
was in the North. Washington, in his will, provided 
for the emancipation of his own slaves, and said to 
Jefferson that it " was among his first wishes to see 
some plan adopted by which slavery in his country 
might be abolished." Jefferson said, referring to the 
institution : '^ I tremble for my country when I think 
that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever," 
— and Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Patrick Henry 
were all utterly opposed to it. But it was made the 
subject of a fatal compromise in the Federal Constitu- 
tion, whereby its existence was recognized in the States 
as a basis of representation, the prohibition of the im- 
portation of slaves was postponed for twenty years, and 
the return of fugitive slaves provided for. But no 
imminent danger was apprehended from it till, by the 
invention of the cotton gin in 1792, cotton culture by 
negro labor became at once and forever the leading in- 
dustry of the South, and gave a new impetus to the 
importation of slaves, so that in 1808, when the consti- 
tutional prohibition took effect, their numbers had 
vastly increased. From that time forward slavery be- 
came the basis of a great political power, and the South- 
ern States, under all circumstances and at every oppor- 
tunity, carried on a brave and unrelenting struggle for 
its maintenance and extension. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 17 

The conscience of the North was slow to rise against 
it, though bitter controversies from time to time took 
place. The Southern leaders threatened disunion if 
their demands were not complied with. To save the 
Union, compromise after compromise was made ; but 
each one in the end was broken. The Missouri Com- 
promise, made in 1820 upon the occasion of the ad- 
mission of Missouri into the Union as a slave State, — 
whereby, in consideration of such admission, slavery was 
forever excluded from the Northwest Territory, — was 
ruthlessly repealed in 1854, by a Congress elected in the 
interests of the slave power, the intent being to force 
slavery into that vast territory which had so long been 
dedicated to freedom. This challenge at last aroused 
the slumbering conscience and passion of the North, and 
led to the formation of the Eepublican party for the 
avowed purpose of preventing, by constitutional methods, 
the further extension of slavery. 

In its first campaign in 1856, though it failed to elect 
its candidates, it received a surprising vote and carried 
many of the States. No one could any longer doubt that 
the North had made up its mind that no threats of dis- 
union should deter it from pressing its cherished purpose 
and performing its long neglected duty. From the out- 
set, Lincoln was one of the most active and effective 
leaders and speakers of the new party, and the great de- 
bates between Lincoln and Douglas in 1858, as the re- 
spective champions of the restriction and extension of 
slavery, attracted the attention of the whole country. 
Lincoln's powerful arguments carried conviction every- 
where. His moral nature was thoroughly aroused — his 
conscience was stirred to the quick. Unless slavery was 
wrong, nothing was wrong. Was each man, of whatever 
color, entitled to the fruits of his own labor, or could one 



18 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

man live in idle luxury by tlie sweat of another's brow, 
whose skin was darker ? He was an implicit believer in 
that principle of the Declaration of Independence that 
all men are vested with certain inalienable rights — the 
equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 
On this doctrine he staked his case and carried it. We 
have time only for one or two sentences in which he 
struck the keynote of the contest : 

" The real issue in this country is the eternal struggle 
between these two principles — right and wrong — 
throughout the world. They are the two principles 
that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, 
and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the com- 
mon right of humanity, and the other the divine right of 
kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it de- 
velops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ' You work 
and toil and earn bread and I '11 eat it.' " 

He foresaw with unerring vision that the conflict was 
inevitable and irrepressible — that one or the other, the 
right or the wrong, freedom or slavery, must ultimately 
prevail and wholly prevail, throughout the country ; and 
this was the principle that carried the war, once begun, 
to a finish. 

One sentence of his is immortal : 

" Under the operation of the policy of compromise, the 
slavery agitation has not only not ceased, but has con- 
stantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease until 
a crisis shall have been reached and passed. ' A house 
divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this gov- 
ernment cannot endure permanently half slave and half 
free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do 
not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease 
to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the 
other; either the opponents of slavery will arrest the 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 19 

further spread of it, and place it where the public mind 
shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate 
extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it 
shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as 
new, North as well as South.'^ 

During the entire decade from 1850 to 1860 the agi- 
tation of the slavery question was at the boiling point, 
and events which have become historical continually 
indicated the near approach of the overwhelming storm. 
No sooner had the Compromise Acts of 1850 resulted in 
a temporary peace, which everybody said must be final 
and perpetual, than new outbreaks came. The forcible 
carrying away of fugitive slaves by Federal troops from 
Boston agitated that ancient stronghold of freedom to 
its foundations. The publication of " Uncle Tom's 
Cabin," which truly exposed the frightful possibilities 
of the slave system ; the reckless attempts by force and 
fraud to establish it in Kansas against the will of the 
vast majority of the settlers ; the beating of Sumner in 
the Senate Chamber for words spoken in debate ; the 
Dred Scott decision in the Supreme Court, which made 
the nation realize that the slave power had at last 
reached the fountain of Federal justice ; and finally 
the execution of John Brown, for his wild raid into 
Virginia, to invite the slaves to rally to the standard of 
freedom which he unfurled : — all these events tend to 
illustrate and confirm Lincoln's contention that the 
nation could not permanently continue half slave and 
half free, but must become all one thing or all the 
other. When John Brown lay under sentence of death 
he declared that now he was sure that slavery must be 
wiped out in blood ; but neither he nor his executioners 
dreamt that within four years a million soldiers would 
be marching across the country for its final extirpation, 
to the music of the war-song of the great conflict : 



20 ABBAHAM LINCOLN. 

'' John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, 
But his soul is marching on." 

And now, at the age of fifty-one, this child of the 
wilderness, this farm laborer, rail-splitter, flat-boatman 
— this surveyor, lawyer, orator, stateman, and patriot, 
found himself elected by the great party which was 
pledged to prevent at all hazards the further extension 
of slavery, as the chief magistrate of the Eepublic, 
bound to carry out that purpose, to be the leader and 
ruler of the nation in its most trying hour. 

Those who believe that there is a living Providence 
that overrules and conducts the affairs of nations, find 
in the elevation of this plain man to this extraordinary 
fortune and to this great duty which he so fitly dis- 
charged, a signal vindication of their faith. Perhaps to 
this philosophical institution the judgment of our philoso- 
pher Emerson will commend itself as a just estimate of 
Lincoln's historical place : 

" His occupying the chair of state was a triumph of 
the good sense of mankind and of the public conscience. 
He grew according to the need ; his mind mastered the 
problem of the day : and as the problem grew, so did his 
comprehension of it. In the war there was no place for 
holiday magistrate, nor fair weather sailor. The new 
pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four 
years — four years of battle days — his endurance, his 
fertility of resource, his magnanimity, were sorely tried, 
and never found wanting. There, by his courage, his 
justice, his even temper, his fertile counsel, his humanity, 
he stood a heroic figure in the centre of a heroic epoch. 
He is the true history of the American people in his 
time, the true representative of this continent — father 
of his country, the pulse of twenty millions throbbing 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 21 

in his heart, the thought of their mind articulated in his 
tongue.'' 

He was born great, as distinguished from those who 
achieve greatness or have it thrust upon them, and his 
inherent capacity, mental, moral, and physical, having 
been recognized by the educated intelligence of a free 
people, they happily chose him for their ruler in a day 
of deadly peril. 

It is now forty years since I first saw and heard Abra- 
ham Lincoln, but the impression which he left on my 
mind is ineffaceable. After his great successes in the 
West he came to New York to make a political address. 
He appeared in every sense of the word like one of the 
plain people among whom he loved to be counted. At 
first sight there was nothing impressive or imposing 
about him — except that his great stature singled him 
out from the crowd ; his clothes hung awkwardly on his 
giant frame, his face was of a dark pallor, without the 
slightest tinge of color ; his seamed and rugged features 
bore the furrows of hardship and struggle ; his deep-set 
eyes looked sad and anxious ; his countenance in repose 
gave little evidence of that brain power which had raised 
him from the lowest to the highest station among his 
countrymen ; as he talked to me before the meeting, he 
seemed ill at ease, with that sort of apprehension which 
a young man might feel before presenting himself to a 
new and strange audience, whose critical disposition he 
dreaded. It was a great audience, including all the 
noted men — all the learned and cultured — of his party 
in New York: editors, clergymen, statesmen, lawyers 
merchants, critics. They were all very curious to hear 
him. His fame as a powerful speaker had preceded 
him, and exaggerated rumor of his wit — the worst fore- 
runner of an orator — had reached the East. When Mr. 



22 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

Bryant presented him, on the high platform of the 
Cooper Institute, a vast sea of eager upturned faces 
greeted him, full of intense curiosity to see what this 
rude child of the people was like. He was equal to the 
occasion. When he spoke he was transformed ; his eye 
kindled, his voice rang, his face shone and seemed to 
light up the whole assembly. For an hour and a half he 
held his audience in the hollow of his hand. His style 
of speech and manner of delivery were severely simple. 
What Lowell called "The grand simplicities of the 
Bible," with which he was so familiar, were reflected in 
his discourse. With no attempt at ornament or rhetoric, 
without parade or pretence, he spoke straight to the 
point. If any came expecting the turgid eloquence or 
the ribaldry of the frontier, they must have been startled 
at the earnest and sincere purity of his utterances. It 
was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere 
self discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had 
outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his own way 
to the grandeur and strength of absolute simplicity. 

He spoke upon the theme which he had mastered so 
thoroughly. He demonstrated by copious historical 
proofs and masterly logic that the fathers who created 
the Constitution in order to form a more perfect union, 
to establish justice, and to secure the blessings of liberty 
to themselves and their posterity, intended to empower 
the Federal Government to exclude slavery from the 
territories. In the kindliest spirit he protested against 
the avowed threat of the Southern States to destroy the 
Union if, in order to secure freedom in those vast 
regions out of which future States were to be carved, a 
Eepublican President were elected. He closed with an 
appeal to his audience, spoken with all the fire of his 
aroused and kindling conscience, with a full outpouring 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 23 

of his love of justice and liberty, to maintain their 
political purpose on tliat lofty and unassailable issue of 
right and wrong which alone could justify it, and not to 
be intimidated from their high resolve and sacred duty 
by any threats of destruction to the government or of 
ruin to themselves. He concluded with this telling 
sentence, which drove the whole argument home to all 
our hearts : ^^Let us have faith that right makes might, 
and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty 
as we understand it." That night the great hall, and 
the next day the whole city, rang with delighted ap- 
plause and congratulations, and he who had come as a 
stranger departed with the laurels of a great triumph. 

Alas ! in five years from that exulting night I saw 
him again, for the last time, in the same city, borne in 
his coffin through its draped streets. With tears and 
lamentations a heart-broken people accompanied him 
from Washington, the scene of his martyrdom, to his 
last resting-place in the young city of the West, where 
he had worked his way to fame. 

Never was a new ruler in a more desperate plight than 
Lincoln when he entered office on the fourth of March, 
1861, four months after his election, and took his oath 
to support the Constitution and the Union. The inter- 
vening time had been busily employed by the Southern 
States in carrying out their threat of disunion in the 
event of his election. As soon as the fact was ascer- 
tained, seven of them had seceded and had seized upon 
the forts, arsenals, navy yards, and other public property 
of the United States within their boundaries, and were 
making every preparation for war. In the meantime 
the retiring President, who had been elected by the 
slave power, and who thought the seceding States could 
not lawfully be coerced, had done absolutely nothing. 



24 ABBAHAM LINCOLN. 

Lincoln found himself, by the Constitution, Commander- 
in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, 
but with only a remnant of either at hand. Each was 
to be created on a great scale out of the unknown re- 
sources of a nation untried in war. 

In his mild and conciliatory inaugural address, while 
appealing to the seceding States to return to their allegi- 
ance, he avowed his purpose to keep the solemn oath he 
had taken that day, to see that the laws of the Union were 
faithfully executed, and to use the troops to recover the 
forts, navy yards, and other property belonging to the 
government. It is probable, however, that neither side 
actually realized that war was inevitable, and that the 
other was determined to fight, until the assault on Fort 
Sumter presented the South as the first aggressor and 
roused the North to use every possible resource to main- 
tain the government and the imperilled Union, and to 
vindicate the supremacy of the flag over every inch of 
the territory of the United States. The fact that 
Lincoln's first proclamation called for only 75,000 troops, 
to serve for three months, shows how inadequate was 
even his idea of what the future had in store. But from 
that moment Lincoln and his loyal supporters never 
faltered in their purpose. They knew they could win, 
that it was their duty to win, and that for America the 
whole hope of the future depended upon their winning, 
for now by the acts of the seceding States the issue of 
the election — to secure or prevent the extension of 
slavery — stood transformed into a struggle to preserve 
or to destroy the Union. 

We cannot follow this contest. You know its gigantic 
proportions ; that it lasted four years instead of three 
months ; that in its progress, instead of 75,000 men, more 
than 2,000,000 were enrolled on the side of the o^ovem- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 25 

ment alone; that tlie aggregate cost and loss to the 
nation approximated to 1,000,000,000 pounds sterling, 
and that not less than 300,000 brave and precious lives 
were sacrificed on each side. History has recorded how- 
Lincoln bore himself during these four frightful years ; 
that he was the real President, the responsible and actual 
head of the government, through it all ; that he listened 
to all advice, heard all parties, and then, always realizing 
his responsibility to God and the nation, decided every 
great executive question for himself. His absolute 
honesty had become proverbial long before he was Presi- 
dent. " Honest Abe Lincoln " was the name by which 
he had been known for years. His every act attested it. 

In all the grandeur of the vast power that he wielded, 
he never ceased to be one of the plain people, as he 
always called them, never lost or impaired his perfect 
sympathy with them, was always in perfect touch with 
them and open to their appeals ; and here lay the very 
secret of his personality and of his power, for the people 
in turn gave him their absolute confidence. His courage, 
his fortitude, his patience, his hopefulness, were sorely 
tried but never exhausted. 

He was true as steel to his generals, but had frequent 
occasion to change them, as he found them inadequate. 
This serious and painful duty rested wholly upon him, 
and was perhaps his most important function as Com- 
mander-in-Chief ; but when, at last, he recognized in 
General Grant the master of the situation, the man who 
could and would bring the war to a triumphant end, he 
gave it all over to him and upheld him with all his 
might. Amid all the pressure and distress that the bur- 
dens of office brought upon him, his unfailing sense of 
humor saved him ; probably it made it possible for him 
to live under the burden. He had always been the 



26 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

great story-teller of the West, and he used and culti- 
vated this faculty to relieve the weight of the load he 
bore. 

It enabled him to keep the wonderful record of never 
having lost his temper, no matter what agony he had to 
bear. A whole night might be spent in recounting the 
stories of his wit, humor, and harmless sarcasm. But I 
will recall only two of his sayings, both about General 
Grant, who always found plenty of enemies and critics 
to urge the President to oust him from his command. 
One, I am sure, will interest all Scotchmen. They re- 
peated with malicious intent the gossip that Grant drank. 
" What does he drink ? " asked Lincoln. " Whiskey,'' 
was, of course, the answer ; doubtless you can guess the 
brand. "Well," said the President, "just find out 
what particular kind he uses and I '11 send a barrel to 
each of my other generals." The other must be as 
pleasing to the British as to the American ear. When 
pressed again on other grounds to get rid of Grant, he 
declared, " I can't spare that man, he fights ! " 

He was tender-hearted to a fault, and never could 
resist the appeals of wives and mothers of soldiers who 
had got into trouble, and were under sentence of death 
for their offences. His Secretary of War and other 
officials complained that they never could get deserters 
shot. As surely as the women of the culprit's family 
could get at him he always gave way. Certainly yo\i 
v/ill all appreciate his exquisite sympathy with the 
suffering relatives of those who had fallen in battle. 
His heart bled with theirs. Never was there a more 
gentle and tender utterance than his letter to a mother 
who had given all her sons to her country, written at a 
time when the angel of death had visited almost every 
household in the land, and was already hovering over him. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 27 

" I have been shown/' he says, " in the files of the War 
Department a statement that you are the mother of five 
sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I 
feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine 
which should attempt to beguile you from your grief for 
a loss so overwhelming — but I cannot refrain from ten- 
dering to you the consolation which may be found in 
the thanks of the Eepublic they died to save. I pray 
that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of 
your bereavement and leave you only the cherished mem- 
ory of the loved and the lost, and the solemn pride that 
must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the 
altar of freedom." 

/ Hardly could your illustrious sovereign, from the 
depths of her queenly and womanly heart, have spoken 
words more touching and tender to soothe the stricken 
mothers of her own soldiers. /" 

The Emancipation Proclamation, with which Mr. Lin- 
coln delighted the country and the world on the first of 
January, 1863, will doubtless secure for him a foremost 
place in history among the philanthropists and benefac- 
tors of the race, as it rescued, from hopeless and degrading 
slavery, so many millions of his fellow beings described 
in the law and existing in fact as " chattels-personal, in 
the hands of their owners and possessors, to all intents, 
constructions, and purposes whatsoever." Rarely does 
the happy fortune come to one man to render such a ser- 
vice to his kind — to proclaim liberty throughout the 
land unto all the inhabitants thereof. 

Ideas rule the world, and never was there a more 
signal instance of this triumph of an idea than here. 
William Lloyd Garrison, who thirty years before had be- 
gun his crusade for the abolition of slavery, and had lived 
to see this glorious and unexpected consummation of the 



28 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

hopeless cause to which he had devoted his life, well de- 
scribed the proclamation as a " great historic event, sub- 
lime in its magnitude, momentous and beneficent in its 
far-reaching consequences, and eminently just and right 
alike to the oppressor and the oppressed." 

Lincoln had always been heart and soul opposed to 
slavery. Tradition says that on the trip on the flat-boat 
to New Orleans he formed his first and last opinion of 
slavery at the sight of negroes chained and scourged, and 
that then and there the iron entered into his soul. No 
boy could grow to manhood in those days as a poor white 
in Kentucky and Indiana, in close contact with slavery 
or in its neighborhood, without a growing consciousness 
of its blighting efi'ects on free labor, as well of its fright- 
ful injustice and cruelty. In the Legislature of Illinois, 
where the public sentiment was all for upholding the 
institution and violently against every movement for its 
abolition or restriction, upon the passage of resolutions 
to that effect he had the courage with one companion to 
put on record his protest, " believing that the institution 
of slavery is founded both in injustice and bad policy." 
No great demonstration of courage, you will say ; but 
that was at a time when Garrison, for his abolition utter- 
ances, had been dragged by an angry mob through the 
streets of Boston with a rope around his body, and in the 
very year that Love joy in the same State of Illinois was 
slain by rioters while defending his press, from which he 
had printed anti-slavery appeals. 

In Congress he brought in a bill for gradual abolition 
in the District of Columbia, with compensation to the 
owners, — for until they raised treasonable hands against 
the life of the nation he always maintained that the 
property of the slave-holders, into which they had come 
by two centuries of descent, without fault on their part, 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 29 

ouglit not to be taken away from them without just com- 
pensation He used to say that, one way or another, he 
had voted forty-two times for the Wilmot proviso, which 
Mr. Wihnot of Pennsylvania moved as an addition to 
every bill which affected United States territory, — " That 
neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist 
in any part of the said territory," — and it is evident that 
his condemnation of the system, on moral grounds as a 
crime against the human race, and on political grounds 
as a cancer that was sapping the vitals of the nation, and 
must master its whole being or be itself extirpated, grew 
steadily upon him until it culminated in his great speeches 
in the Illinois debate. 

By the mere election of Lincoln to the Presidency, the 
further extension of slavery into the territories was ren- 
dered forever impossible — Vox populi, vox Dei. Revo- 
lutions never go backward, and when founded on a great 
moral sentiment stirring the heart of an indignant people 
their edicts are irresistible and final. Had the slave 
power acquiesced in that election, had the Southern 
States remained under the Constitution and within the 
Union, and relied upon their constitutional and legal 
rights, their favorite institution, immoral as it was, 
blighting and fatal as it was, might have endured for 
another century. The great party that had elected him, 
unalterably determined against its extension, was never- 
theless pledged not to interfere with its continuance in 
the States where it already existed. Of course, when 
new regions were forever closed against it, from its very 
nature it must have begun to shrink and to dwindle ; and 
probably gradual and compensated emancipation, which 
appealed very strongly to the new President's sense of 
justice and expediency, would, in the progress of time, 
by a reversion to the ideas of the founders of the E-e- 



30 ABBAHAM LINCOLN. 

public, have found a safe outlet for both masters and 
slaves. But whom the gods wish to destroy they first 
make mad, and when seven States, afterwards increased 
to eleven, openly seceded from the Union, when they 
declared and began the war upon the nation, and chal- 
lenged its mighty power to the desperate and protracted 
struggle for its life, and for the maintenance of its 
authority as a nation over its territory, they gave to 
Lincoln and to freedom the sublime opportunity of 
history. 

In his first inaugural address, when as yet not a drop 
of precious blood had been shed, while he held out to 
them the olive branch in one hand, in the other he pre- 
sented the guarantees of the Constitution, and after 
reciting the emphatic resolution of the Convention that 
nominated him, that the maintenance inviolate of the 
" rights of the States, and especially the right of each 
State to order and control its own domestic institutions 
according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential 
to that balance of power on which the perfection and 
endurance of our political fabric depend,'' he reiterated 
this sentiment, and declared, with no mental reservation, 
^' that all the protection which, consistently with the 
Constitution and the laws, can be given, will be cheerfully 
given to all the States when lawfully demanded for 
whatever cause — as cheerfully to one section as to an- 
other." 

When, however, these magnanimous overtures for 
peace and reunion were rejected; when the seceding 
States defied the Constitution and every clause and 
principle of it ; when they persisted in staying out of the 
Union from which they had seceded, and proceeded to 
carve out of its territory a new and hostile empire based 
on slavery ; when they flew at the throat of the nation 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 31 

and plunged it into the bloodiest war of the nineteenth 
century — the tables were turned, and the belief gradu- 
ally came to the mind of the President that if the Eebel- 
lion was not soon subdued by force of arms, if the war 
must be fought out to the bitter end, then to reach that 
end the salvation of the nation itself might require the 
destruction of slavery wherever it existed ; that if the 
war was to continue on one side for Disunion, for no 
other purpose than to preserve slavery, it must continue 
on the other side for the Union, to destroy slavery. 

As he said, "Events control me; I cannot control 
events," and as the dreadful war progressed and became 
more deadly and dangerous, the unalterable conviction 
was forced upon him that, in order that the frightful 
sacrifice of life and treasure on both sides might not be 
all in vain, it had become his duty as Commander-in- 
Chief of the Army, as a necessary war measure, to strike 
a blow at the Eebellion which, all others failing, would 
inevitably lead to its annihilation, by annihilating the 
very thing for which it was contending. His own words 
are the best : 

" I understood that my oath to preserve the Constitu- 
tion to the best of my ability imposed upon me the duty 
of preserving by every indispensable means that govern- 
ment — that nation — of which that Constitution was the 
organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation and yet 
preserve the Constitution? By general law, life and 
limb must be protected ; yet often a limb must be ampu- 
tated to save a life ; but a life is never wisely given to 
save a limb. I felt that measures otherwise unconstitu- 
tional might become lawful by becoming indispensable to 
the preservation of the Constitution through the preser- 
vation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this 
ground and now avow it. I could not feel that, to the 



32 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

best of my ability, I had ever tried to preserve the Con- 
stitution if to save slavery or any minor matter I should 
permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitu- 
tion all together." 

And so, at last, when in his judgment the indispen- 
sable necessity had come, he struck the fatal blow, and 
signed the proclamation which has made his name im- 
mortal. By it, the President, a,« Commander-in-Chief in 
time of actual armed rebellion, and as a fit and necessary 
war measure for suppressing the rebellion, proclaimed all 
persons held as slaves in the States and parts of States 
then in rebellion to be thenceforward free, and declared 
that the executive, with the army and navy, would rec- 
ognize and maintain their freedom. 

In the other great steps of the government, which led 
to the triumphant prosecution of the war, he necessarily 
shared the responsibility and the credit with the great 
statesmen who stayed up his hands in his Cabinet, — with 
Seward, Chase and Stanton, and the rest, and with his 
generals and admirals, his soldiers and sailors, — but 
this great act was absolutely his own. The conception 
and execution were exclusively his. He laid it before 
his Cabinet as a measure on which his mind was made 
up and could not be changed, asking them only for sug- 
gestions as to details. He chose the time and the cir- 
cumstances under which the Emancipation should be 
proclaimed and when it should take effect. 

It came not an hour too soon ; but public opinion in 
the North would not have sustained it earlier. In the 
first eighteen months of the war its ravages had extended 
from the Atlantic to beyond the Mississippi. Many 
victories in the West had been balanced and paralyzed 
by inaction and disasters in Virginia, only partially re- 
deemed by the bloody and indecisive battle of Antietam j 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 33 

a reaction had set in from the general enthusiasm which 
had swept the Northern States after the assault upon 
Sumter. It could not truly be said that they had lost 
heart, but faction was raising its head. Heard through 
the land like the blast of a bugle, the proclamation 
rallied the patriotism of the country to fresh sacrifices 
and renewed ardor. It was a step that could not be 
revoked. It relieved the conscience of the nation from 
an incubus that had oppressed it from its birth. The 
United States were rescued from the false predicament 
in which they had been from the beginning, and the 
great popular heart leaped with new enthusiasm for 
"Liberty and Union, henceforth and forever, one and 
inseparable." It brought not only moral but material 
support to the cause of the government, for within two 
years 120,000 colored troops were enlisted in the military 
service and following the national flag, supported by all 
the loyalty of the North, and led by its choicest spirits. 
One mother said, when her son was oifered the command 
of the first colored regiment, " If he accepts it I shall be 
as proud as if I had heard that he was shot." He was 
shot heading a gallant charge of his regiment. The Con- 
federates replied to a request of his friends for his body 
that they " had buried him under a layer of his niggers ; " 
but that mother has lived to enjoy thirty-six years of his 
glory, and Boston has erected its noblest monument to 
his memory. 

The effect of the proclamation upon the actual prog- 
ress of the war was not immediate, but wherever the 
Federal armies advanced they carried freedom with 
them, and when the summer came round the new spirit 
and force which had animated the heart of the govern- 
ment and people were manifest. In the first week of 
July the decisive battle of Gettysburg turned the tide 
LofC. 



34 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

of war, and the fall of Vicksburg made the great river 
free from its source to the Gulf. 

On foreign nations the influence of the proclamation 
and of these new victories was of great importance. In 
those days, when there was no cable, it was not easy for 
foreign observers to appreciate what was really going 
on ; they could not see clearly the true state of affairs, 
as in the last year of the nineteenth century we have 
been able, by our new electric vision, to watch every 
event at the antipodes and observe its effect. The Eebel 
emissaries, sent over to solicit intervention, spared no 
pains to impress upon the minds of public and private 
men and upon the press their own views of the character 
of the contest. The prospects of the Confederacy were 
always better abroad than at home. The stock markets 
of the world gambled upon its chances, and its bonds 
at one time were high in favor. 

Such ideas as these were seriously held : that the North 
was fighting for empire and the South for independence; 
that the Southern States, instead of being the grossest 
oligarchies, essentially despotisms, founded on the right 
of one man to appropriate the fruit of other men's toil 
and to exclude them from equal rights, were real repub- 
lics, feebler to be sure than their Northern rivals, but 
representing the same idea of freedom, and that the 
mighty strength of the nation was being put forth to 
crush them ; that Jefferson Davis and the Southern lead- 
ers had created a nation ; that the republican experiment 
had failed, and the Union had ceased to exist. But the 
crowning argument to foreign minds was that it was an 
utter impossibility for the government to win in the con- 
test ; that the success of the Southern States, so far as 
separation was concerned, was as certain as any event 
yet future and contingent could be ; that the subjugation 



ABBAHAM LINCOLN. 35 

of the South by the North, even if it could be accom- 
plished, would prove a calamity to the United States 
and the world, and especially calamitous to the negro 
race ; and that such a victory would necessarily leave 
the people of the South for many generations cherishing 
deadly hostility against the government and the North, 
and plotting always to recover their independence. 

When Lincoln issued his proclamation he knew that 
all these ideas were founded in error ; that the national 
resources were inexhaustible ; that the government 
could and would win, and that if slavery were once 
finally disposed of, the only cause of difference being out 
of the way, the North and South would come together 
again, and by and by be as good friends as ever. In 
many quarters abroad the proclamation was welcomed 
with enthusiasm by the friends of America; but I think 
the demonstrations in its favor that brought more gladness 
to Lincoln's heart than any other were the meetings held 
in the manufacturing centres by the very operatives 
upon whom the war bore the hardest, expressing the 
most enthusiastic sympathy with the proclamation, 
while they bore with heroic fortitude the grievous priva- 
tions which the war entailed upon them. Mr. Lincoln's 
expectation when he announced to the world that all 
slaves in all States then in rebellion were set free must 
have been that the avowed position of his government, 
that the continuance of the war now meant the annihi- 
lation of slavery, would make intervention impossible 
for any foreign nation whose people were lovers of lib- 
erty — and so the result proved. 

/The growth and development of Lincoln's mental 
power and moral force, of his intense and magnetic per- 
sonality, after the vast responsibilities of government 
were thrown upon him at the age of fifty-two, furnish a 



36 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

rare and striking illustration of the marvellous capacity 
and adaptability of the human intellect — of the sound 
mind in the sound body. He came to the discharge of 
the great duties of the Presidency with absolutely no 
experience in the administration of government, or of 
the vastly varied and complicated questions of foreign 
and domestic policy which immediately arose, and con- 
tinued to press upon him during the rest of his life; 
but he mastered each as it came, apparently with the 
facility of a trained and experienced ruler. As Claren- 
don said of Cromwell, " His parts seemed to be raised by 
the demands of great station.'' His life through it all 
was one of intense labor, anxiety, and distress, without 
one hour of peaceful repose from first to last. But he 
rose to every occasion. He led public opinion, but did 
not march so far in advance of it as to fail of its effective 
support in every great emergency. He knew the heart 
and thought of the people, as no man not in constant 
and absolute sympathy with them could have known 
it, and so holding their confidence, he triumphed through 
and with them. Not only was there this steady growth 
of intellect, but the infinite delicacy of his nature and 
its capacity for refinement developed also, as exhibited 
in the purity and perfection of his language and style 
of speech. The rough backwoodsman, who had never 
seen the inside of a university, became in the end, by 
self training and the exercise of his own powers of mind, 
heart, and soul, a master of style, and some of his utter- 
ances will rank with the best, the most perfectly adapted 
to the occasion which produced them^'^ 

Have you time to listen to his two minutes' speech at 
Gettysburg^ at the dedication of the Soldiers' Cemetery ? 
His whole soul was in it : 

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought 
forth on this continent a new nation conceived in libpi'ty 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 37 

and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created 
equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing 
wliefclier that nation, or any nation so conceived and so 
dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great 
battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a 
portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who 
here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is 
altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. 
But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate — we cannot 
consecrate — we cannot hallow this ground. The brave 
men, living and dead, who struggled here have conse- 
crated it far above our poor power to add or detract. 
The world will little note, nor long remember, what we 
say here — but it can never forget what they did here. 
It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the 
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus 
far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here 
dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that 
from these honored dead we take increased devotion to 
that cause for which they gave the last full measure of 
devotion — that we here highly resolve, that these dead 
shall not have died in vain — that this nation under God 
shall have a new birth of freedom — and that govern- 
ment of the people, by the people, and for the people 
shall not perish from the earth." 

He lived to see his work indorsed by an overwhelming 
majority of his countrymen. In his second inaugural 
address, pronounced just forty days before his death, 
there is a single passage which well displays his indomit- 
able will and at the same time his deep religious feeling, 
his sublime charity to the enemies of his country, and his 
broad and catholic humanity : 

" If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of 
those offences which in the Providence of God must needs 
come, but which having continued through the appointed 



38 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both 
North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to 
those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein 
any departure from those divine attributes which the 
believers in a living God always ascribe to Him ? Fondly 
do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty 
scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God 
wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the 
bondsmen's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited 
toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn 
with the lash shall be paid with another drawn by the 
sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it 
must be said, ' the judgments of the Lord are true and 
righteous altogether.' 

" With malice toward none, with charity for all, with 
firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right — 
let us strive on to finish the work we are in ; to bind up 
the nation's wounds ; to care for him who shall have 
borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to 
do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting 
peace among ourselves, and with all nations." ji^*. 

His prayer was answered. The forty days of life that 
remained to him were crowned with great historic events. 
He lived to see his Proclamation of Emancipation em- 
bodied in an amendment of the Constitution, adopted by 
Congress, and submitted to the States for ratification. 
The mighty scourge of war did speedily pass away, for 
it was given him to witness the surrender of the Eebel 
army and the fall of their capital, and the starry flag that 
he loved waving in triumph over the national soil. When 
he died by the madman's hand in the supreme hour of 
victory, the vanquished lost their best friend, and the 
human race one of its noblest examples; and all the 
friends of freedom and justice, in whose cause he lived 
and died, joined hands as mourners at his grave. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




011839 309 ^ 





